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Things are definitely a little quieter here in MariaDB land as many people embark on summer vacations to rest and recharge. However we will be at OSCON 2012. We have a booth in the non-profit/projects pavilion, amazing amounts of schwag, and the famous black vodka that Monty always brings with him. We plan to have a BoF on Thursday evening (come to D135 at 8pm), and we will be at the MySQL BoF on Wednesday evening as well, just for good measure.

Come say hi. Come tell us how you’re using MariaDB. Come tell us what you want from MariaDB. Come tell us why you switched. Or what we can do to make you switch. It should be all round fun.

It is not a secret that we’ve been kicking the tires and playing with JIRA for project management. After using it since the beginning of the year most of us like the feel of it and we’ve decided that it makes sense to start using it more.

As you know, the MariaDB project has many fragmented resources. We report bugs in Launchpad. We store our plans in worklog. We’ve never used the Launchpad Blueprint feature for this very reason. We don’t use Launchpad Answers because we have the Knowledgebase.

With this move to hosted JIRA (yes, this is an important link: http://mariadb.org/jira) we can report bugs, have future plans, and also give users a roadmap which is pretty cool. One nifty feature is that in the past two releases, we had a roadmap and we didn’t slip in terms of a schedule. We had on time releases and that’s awesome!

So what does this mean for you? To report bugs, you will now do so on JIRA. To make feature requests and talk about our future plans, you will also now use JIRA.

We plan to deprecate Worklog and Launchpad bugs by 30 June 2012. Launchpad will however continue to host the source code for MariaDB.

What will happen to bugs already reported on Launchpad? We have migration scripts ready for this and when we press the button bug reports will nicely migrate over to JIRA. After that is done we’ll place a notification on the MariaDB bugs page in Launchpad about reporting new bugs in JIRA.

What will happen to feature requests and ideas already inworklog? Worklog will be put into a read-only mode and there will be notifications about the move to JIRA. Whenever needed we’ll copy & paste worklog items into JIRA.

What does it mean to the openness of the MariaDB project? It’s not affected at all. The MariaDB project will remain an open community friendly project and as a bonus it will be easier to follow what is going on in the project since you don’t have to jump between several tools to get the complete picture.

The consolidation to JIRA provides the means to report and track project status easier than before, which allows the MariaDB team, community members and other to better coordinate and prioritize work.

As a side note, JIRA (and other software by Atlassian) has sometimes been criticized in the open source world because of its commercial nature and many are unaware of the fact that Atlassian do offer a free Open Source Project License to open source projects, which is what is being used with MariaDB.

As another side note, I’m not going to dive into comparing features in e.g. Launchpad with features in JIRA. I do know it would be possible to use blueprints for feature specifications etc. in Launchpad. The most important aspect in my mind is that you pick a tool that you like the feel of, has the features you need and tightens collaboration between developers, project managers, community members and other persons involved in the project.